12Apr 11

A treatise on individualism from Nik Kershaw, the pop philosopher who brought us “The Riddle”? Expectations raised! And “The One And Only” absolutely does not disappoint. “No one can be myself like I can / For this job I’m the best man / And while this may be true / You are the one and only you.”

The job of delivering this weighty message goes to Chesney Hawkes, a likeably harmless singer not destined for anything much, and so oddly appropriate for a song which thinks about declaring independence, dips a toe in the waters of freedom and then steps back in utter confusion. “I can’t wear this uniform without some compromises” – OK THEN, says The Man, happily changing said uniform’s fit. And what about the magnificently pouty “Don’t tell me I know best / I’m not the same as all the rest”? Not having seen source film Buddy’s Song, I can only guess that the “I know best” is meant to be reported speech, but that’s not how Chesney phrases it, and as it stands the lines capture the sheer incoherence of teenage frustration remarkably well.

Musically “The One And Only” is punchy without being interesting – it sounds like a dull 80s holdover until the goofily rockin’ guitar solo brings it to more vulgar life. But it’s Chesney’s incoherent self-assertion that makes this very much of its time. His affable, clean-cut slackness carries a hint of Bill And Ted, but this being 1991 I also find myself thinking of another song fuelled by impossible demands and compromises. Perhaps “The One And Only” is “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for the square majority: hurl your confusion at the world and be home in time for tea.

This list omits the one thing that I remember Hawkes for the most, his appearance – along with Des’ree – as Jarvis’ Cocker’s teammate on Pop Quiz in 1994, a performance of heroic drunkeness on Cocker’s part.

Actually, if we’re heading in that direction I may as well say that I hugely enjoyed both the “Buddy” and “Buddy’s Song” novels as a teen – both managed to nail teenage neuroses, class snobbery, and in the latter’s case, why music and being in a band is such an important outlet for so many young people. I haven’t read them since as a grown man, and I doubt if I did that they’d still have any resonance at all for me – they’re kid’s books, silly – but for a brief while back there they were a good world to get lost in, containing enough drama to be escapist and enough gritty realism for a confused young pup to relate to.

I never did see the film, mind you, perhaps because by the time it was out I was too busy following rather more pretentious literary obsessions to care about Buddy, and also because this song and Chesney Hawkes probably put me off.

@35, MikeMCSG. To be fair, twisted-enough psychopaths (not to mention the incredibly selfish) don’t get the allegedly right outputs from basic golden rule or what if everyone did that? reasoning either. (‘I want to be able to smack people in the head, and drive drunk, etc., and I’m happy for everyone else to have the same liberties. Seee you in the funny pages. Rock and roll.’)

Thinking a little more about TOAO. To be With You by Mr Big was from around this time and had a similar flashback/’several years past its sell-by date’ feel to it. Listening to both again now, though, I appreciate TOAO’s good points a little more than I did earlier (so 4 or 5 is my official score for it now). Youtube confirms that TOAO was used in August 1991 for the opening credits of a Michael J. Fox flick Doc Hollywood (the one that Pixar strip-mined for Cars). This song was and is a nice little earner for Mr Kershaw.

anto is right above on the “but this is *our* music” aspect of buddy– there’s a lot of roger daltrey looking suspiciously at synthesizers and saying ‘how d’you strum that then?’ while chesney roles his eyes and says ‘oh *dad*. But, iirc, in the film ‘the one and only’ is actually what happens when chesney goes back to basics to pay tribute to his dad (who has a heart attach or something?) and unleashes his inner polite rocker. see also the extraordinary ‘hearts of fire’ with Dylan as daltrey and rupert everett as chesney/bowie

The inevitable advert revival kept TOAO in our consciences last year, with the Renault Clio one, where Our Hero (same chap who’s currently telling us all that O2 spend lots of time thinking about it’s customers, while dressed as a cricket jumper-wearing goat) drives his Clio up to the lights belting out “The One And only” with his windows open, alongside a slightly bemused and annoyed older driver in the next lane who…TURNS OUT TO BE HIS GIRLFRIEND’S DAD! Guffaws all round. Needless to say I found that particular ad quite annoying, not only for TOAO, but for it’s attempt to edit out Chesney-Lover’s girlfriend’s mum.

#30. You’re not the only one. My chart awareness nosedived with the disappearance of Record Mirror. Music Week have had me as a subscriber for twenty years now, but as that’s business-biased it’s difficult to regard the Top 75 Singles Chart as anything other than a list of self-generating, self-parodying titles and acts. The garden of my dreams is full of weeds. Seven days can easily pass before I’ve had sufficient inclination to even look beyond the new entries. When RM disappeared, without forewarning, I took to Number One for the charts for 4 weeks. And it delivered this nugget…

#6 – in response to the doppelganger question – “JODIE HAWKES, CHESNEY’S younger brother [is] the drummer with his band!” Their capitals made sense in the context of the magazine, I suppose.

The record’s appeal was a mystery. Melody by numbers, a la Crash, Somewhere In My Heart, dull production – nothing happens. As so many others have pointed out, the lyric is banal. To speculate that it might have anything to say of any real meaning is absurd. I looked back at “On Marks Out Of Ten” and found this was the definition by example of a 1.

It’s a shame, because Nik Kershaw’s work has plenty to like in it, and Chesney Hawkes seems like a lovely man.

I’d stopped getting Record Mirror by this point, but I do remember seeing something about its demise in the Sun’s Bizarre column, which adopted a horribly gleeful tone about the paper’s being axed. If I’m not mistaken the column was at that time written by Andy Coulson and/or Piers Morgan.

#62 – I seem to remember that in the last edition of “Record Mirror” there was a letter of complaint from a reader about the magazine’s new-found dedication to focussing most of its coverage on “Dance music”. The editor’s reply was “You may not like it, but it’s the way we plan to continue for some time”. Obviously that was not to be!

Whilst the magazine was a fantastic source of information about the charts, I think it had been in a bit of a decline for awhile before it shut up shop, unfortunately. I used to really enjoy the fact that they’d cover a wide range of musical genres and artists without adopting the same pious tones as MM and NME, but towards the end it did seem to dumb down considerably (or perhaps I grew up?) Also, as much as I loved a lot of the club music they covered, the interviews with the DJs and artists were seldom revealing or interesting, the KLF being the exception that proved the rule. That Guru Josh was ever considered a “character” and a spectre of controversy by the magazine says it all…

# 63 It was in RM that Guru Josh declared his support for the poll tax – smart career move.

I think they struggled after 1986 when they pinned their colours to the C86 mast putting bands like the Soup Dragons and Talulah Gosh on the cover. When you actually heard them and realised how mediocre they were it didn’t reflect well on the mag.

Eleanor Levy and Andy Strickland resurrected themselves with “90 Minutes” a year or so later until that went belly up in similar fashion in March 1997. That was sad but not nearly so much as RM disappearing.

I know of this record solely because I happened to go to the UK in mid-1991 with my (Northern Irish) mother, and was very curious about the music people listened to there (even as a 9 year old I had picked up some sense of Australia’s cultural cringe). I remember watching this on Top of the Pops and seeing some sort of profile in an issue of Smash Hits I bought.

I also clearly remember thinking that Chesney was totally naff. But I think watching him on TV made me realise that our ideas of cool or trendy or whatever are a little random and a little geocentric – it occurred to me that UK kids who really dug Chesney would probably have the same reaction to Ratcat or Deborah Conway that I had to Chesney.

My little sister and I went to see Chesney play live in 1991. Sis fell for Jodie Hawkes, Chesney’s brother and drummer, and asked if I could arrange for them to meet. Not likely I thought.

Then we went to see Prince over a year later and I left sis to go to the loo before it started. What did I see, but Chesney and Jodie arrive for the concert too, so I ran back and grabbed sis to meet them. They were lovely and generous with kisses and autographs. I did it and made sis a very happy thirteen year-old!

We went to see Chesney play Aladdin in panto in December last year and had a fun afternoon. I couldn’t resist buying a signed CD and found that Curt Smith from Tears for Fears appeared on it. It turns out that Chesney had written for him.

The latest I have seen of Chesney was his entry for the Comic Relief dance thing where he got through to the finals with Toyah, Clare Grogan and Limahl as the eighties supergroup. I had to vote for them, and I have to give this one a nine.

@66: Ratcat would have fitted nicely in the NWONW a few years later in the UK, probably being shiny and polished enough – against the likes of S*M*A*S*H and These Animal Men – to have the moderate chart success while still retaining “indie” as a genre as they did here. Or even at the time, maybe – it’s not that far to Bandwagonesque…

This is perhaps not the most exciting song to make my first comment on but Chesney’s career was rather baffling, as he failed to have another substantial hit, with the follow-up getting to number 27 and the third single missing the Top 40 by miles. Yet Number One magazine went absolutely nuts about him, he was on the cover virtually every other week for three months.

I think it might have something to do with the lack of teen idols at the time, as New Kids On The Block were careering down the dumper (it was during their awful “NKOTB Get Hard” period where they released turgid records with lots of Donnie shouting, and I remember a shambolic appearance on Top of the Pops) and there was nobody else, hence why bog standard hair metal band Extreme won at the Smash Hits Poll Winners’ Party that year, as the guitarist was quite pretty and More Than Words had been quite catchy, because there was just nobody else, and perhaps why Bryan Adams was at number one for so long. Same reason why Number One also enthusiastically leapt on the return of Bros the same year who released a snoozesome album of ballads. Also, Number One wasn’t a very good magazine.

One of the umpteen Number One covers was the unveiling of his band, including his brother, because on his first TV appearances he was accompanied by his “band” from Buddy’s Song who were actors miming.

The other odd thing about Ches is that his album was re-released twice, because it originally came out as the soundtrack album, with the same image of Ches as the poster, with “BUDDY’S SONG” in big letters at the top and “Music from the film by Chesney Hawkes” at the bottom, then it was almost immediately re-released with the same picture, but now with “CHESNEY HAWKES” at the top and “Buddy’s Song” at the bottom to make it look more like his album. Then it was immediately re-released again, with a completely different picture of Ches and the words “Buddy’s Song” in the tiniest type imaginable and no other reference to the film at all, to make it look like a proper album. All very strange.

@68: To me the best comparison to Ratcat is Ash – same cartoony aesthetic, same fuzzy guitars, similar vocal tone, etc. I was always puzzled that Ratcat tanked commercially after “Blind Love” – did they move away from straight pop and try and appeal to JJJ types who wouldn’t have a bar of it because of how popular they’d been? I often see the follow-up in second-hand cheapo bins and wonder whether I should pick it up.

@70 Tim: not so much a case of “moving away”, I suspect, as the definition of “straight pop” changing in the interim. I picked up Insideout back in the day, and found it pretty much the same as Blind Love: patchy, but with catchy singles (“Holiday” was fun). Worth picking up for a couple of bucks. The narrative always seemed to be that Ratcat were indie darlings taken by surprise by their popular success, which then lost them their indie cred; I don’t think their music changed that much from album to album.

Your Ash comparison is inspired, although I think Ash had the better tunes. I still listen to 1977 and buy their latest stuff, but haven’t listened to Ratcat in years.

Re 64: I still have the “Clap hands here comes cutie” edition of Record Mirror, with the Soup Dragons on the cover and style tips inside. All Andy Strickland’s doing, I imagine. He was in The Caretaker Race who were regulars at C86 strongholds the Black Horse and the Falcon in Camden. Pretty sure Tallulah Gosh were never on the cover though; pretty sure I’d have framed it.

Strange, if there was such a gap in the market for a teen idol type, that Chesney didn’t stick around for longer. The follow-up singles weren’t that bad either, certainly no worse than others which have made up a teen-idol career. Maybe that’s why this one big hit has made such a mark on people’s memories of the era and this year in particular. Like the melodic line in the verses and the grand built-up chorus – it has the self-confidence to declare I AM A HIT that Tom has spoken about before now.

A tad harsh to make allusions to Fred West, although I can see where weej is coming from at #34 – to me it’s a nice message about being yourself as opposed to modelling yourself on someone else. It was running through my mind as I watched (and I suppose I should be ashamed for remembering this) Chanelle, the housemate in Big Brother whose entire self-esteem depended on how much she could resemble Posh Spice.

@69, As a former Number One reader, I agree, especially as I found that other artists became big in the 90s due to vacuums caused by a lack of properly interesting big stars with an image, such as David Bowie in the 70s or Boy George in the 80s. There are not that many artists from the 90s that you would recognise in the street, IMHO.

The mistake for Chesney was over-exposure and that messed up people’s appetite for him to the extent that they tend to only want him now in bite-sized pieces. The shirtless photos were probably unnecessary too.

Recent Popular reader, going backwards slowly…
…the only fact I can add to this is that in my ‘moved back home need to find a proper job’ after Uni, I was ushering in our local ‘touring musicals’ theatre, and had the pleasure of having to watch the Barry Manilow musical ‘Can’t Smile Without You’ starring la Hawkes and a host of people who’d come third on reality TV shows, five times in as many days.
From what I recall the plot revolved around some sort of singer (played by our Ches) trying to break big and going on some TV talent show and winning – the most hilarious part was the characters’ weekend trip to Brazil, to shoehorn in ‘Copacabana’.
For the suffering it put me through, I have to deduct points.

Popular

I'm writing about every UK number one single, in order. It's taken a while, it'll take a while longer. Wander around in the archives, or join in with the marvellous bunch of commenters we've managed to attract - new voices always very welcome!

About the Author

Featured Posts

10 Jan 2012
Hi, I’m Lauryn Hill circa my breakthrough role in Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit, and it is a real pleasure to be able to present to you the top ten FreakyTrigger tracks of the year. When my mother told me I couldn’t join the choir run by a fake nun, I got really […]

8 Jun 2010
Here we are, at last. Here we stand at the summit of Pop Football achievement, looking back at 63 matches: some wonderful, some perplexing, some illuminating, very few boring. We’ve heard so much pop, enjoyed so many marvellous moments, and we have 30 losing managers to thank for all their research and taste. Never mind […]

3 Oct 2004
In search of Squirrel – Part two (warning, contains graphic images) Some of you may remember this article I wrote some time ago about my “failure” as a vegetarian and my quest for the different. Well, I’ve done it. Squirrel had become a bit of an obsession, I’d chased up all sorts of alleys (Julian […]

13 Aug 2008
#428, 18th November 1978 “Rat Trap” is billed – in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less – as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it – my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I approached “Rat Trap” cold but with a frisson of definite […]

5 May 2011
#667, 13th July 1991 Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went. Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twenty years so I […]

3 Sep 2007
Mars Planets: the atomisation of the Mars Bar. An entropic dis-integration, the tendency of all things to become more chaotic, in confectionery form. I’m trying to resist the impulse to tie this stuff up to no-such-thing-as-Society atomisation because that’s not how we do things, right? And Mars Planets are better to share than a proper big […]

4 Jan 2005
An OLD MAN and a WISE MAN are sitting on a bench. WISE MAN: Tell me, Old Man, if you had one piece of advice to give young students, what would it be? OLD MAN: I would tell them to be neither too proud or too ashamed of their music taste. The music you hear […]

12 Nov 2014
The Secret History Of Band Aid Everybody remembers Band Aid. And – despite everything – most people remember Band Aid 2. And now we have Band Aid 20 30. Which rather begs the question – why does nobody ever talk about Band Aids 3 to 29? Take a trip down memory lane as we remind […]